This is great. "So far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: the nonlinear reading that so impressed St. Augustine. If the fable of the scroll and codex has a moral, this is it. We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book."

"Open Bookmarks is intended to educate readers as well as developers about what social reading is and why it should be open, in order to create a demand for better services."

"There is no topic in the publishing industry this decade that is the source of as many misconceptions, superstitions, lies, plausible untruths, and idiocies as ebooks". Worthwhile reading for anyone working in the ebook arena.

rmurphey: Getting Better at JavaScript http://post.ly/24M1b

Design and print custom pocket notebooks.

Beer, wine, cheese and coffee notebooks with flavour wheels.

Emergent technology is the most powerful single driver of change in the world, and it has been forever. Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion. It just does. And that’s why we are where we are now. It seems so self-evident to me that I can never go to that Technology: threat or menace? position. Okay, well, if we don’t do this, what are we going to do? This is not only what we do, it’s literally who we are as a species. We’ve become something other than what our ancestors were.

"Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests."

"My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art."

"This helps me understand what happened to blogging when the prospects of financial reward crept in. It changed everything. And, presumably, unless people read and understand this, it's going to happen again when new creative tools are invented."

"If Pattern Recognition was about the immediate psychic aftermath of 9-11, and Spook Country about the deep end of the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq, I could say that Zero History is about the global financial crisis as some sort of nodal event, but that must be true of any 2010 novel with ambitions on the 2010 zeitgeist. But all three of these novels are also about that dawning recognition that the future, be it capital-T Tomorrow or just tomorrow, Friday, just means more stuff, however peculiar and unexpected. A new quotidian. Somebody’s future, somebody else’s past."

"To celebrate the publication of his eagerly anticipated new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell makes a selection, exclusively for Foyles, of his favourite books."

"More disturbingly, [Jonathan Safran Foer] only considers a world where people are in a position to make choices about what they eat. Eating Animals is written by a well-educated, well-fed person for well-educated, well-fed readers. Nor does he contextualise his argument. It never ranges beyond the confines of America. He doesn't seriously examine why people might want to, or have to eat meat, or what meat means to individuals or societies. He proposes no solutions other than mass conversion to vegetarianism, although it doesn't seem to occur to him that the damage done by factory farming doesn't begin and end with animals but embraces all foods."

"What I really need is some kind of subscription model that makes the disintermediating depradations of Google strictly irrelevant. So this leads me to ask what new business models exist that I can monetize and that aren't going to (a) be devalued by Google, (b) undercut by infinite free bandwidth, or (c) require an old dog to learn new skills (like cat-emulation, or screenwriting)?"

"Among many fine photographs in the book is one of Highfort Court flats, in Kingsbury, north London, designed in 1936 by the architect Ernest Trobridge to demonstrate his Swedenborgian belief in symbolism (the building's chimneys are turrets, its entrance a drawbridge)." The Council Flats of Kingsbury?

"Today's big news is that Amazon are going to start selling Kindle ebook readers world-wide. Let me explain why I think this is very bad news for writers."

Finally had a chance to read this. Very good; an Instapaper classic.

"Excuse me, I've just finished reading _____ by _____. What should I read next?"

The follow up to High Performance Websites, from Steve Souders and other yahoos.

"When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others."

Great idea. "It’s a little social experiment that is best described as Pass the Parcel, meets Six Degrees of Separation, meets Message in a Bottle. Every person who receives this book leaves a trace on the next available page [then] they will send the book to the most famous person they know personally. Once we get the book from the last famous person, we’ll auction it on ebay and donate all the money to the NSPCC."

"An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose"

"Who to read besides Coupland, Stephenson, Gibson, and Sterling? I need an informational intake of this sort of highly-regarded (speculative? cyber?) fiction on a regular basis, or else I become irritable."

"This book will tell you how to market products and services through social media channels like blogs, podcasts and Facebook."

"212 Pages of Expert Freelancing Advice"

"A heuristic approach to version control, unit testing, and app deployment."

"An intermediate-level book about interface and interaction design, structured as a pattern language."

"This book isn't just about management, it's about creating places where people can comfortably build stuff."

"Countdown to the August 7, 2007 release of William Gibson's Spook Country with news, thoughts, serious spoilers and chapter summaries in 807 characters or less."

"A gentle introduction to jQuery concepts, allowing you to add interactions and animations to your pages - even if previous attempts at writing JavaScript have left you baffled."

"A community for exchanging used books [...] lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want."

Old school. Still has some relevance.

"A longlist of what are deemed the 50 best film adaptations of all time."

"This website is mainly about my books and some things I find interesting. Among other things, you'll find some short stories, some recipes, a vegan FAQ, lots of stuff about my books and some links to other sites."

"First concept, photographic books, to encourage number and language development and promote thinking and observation skills."

LIFT THE FLAP! Heh.

"Wired for Books HUNDREDS of uncut, behind-the-scenes AUDIO (!) interviews (scroll down) by Don Swain. Douglas Adams, William Burroughs, Joyce Carol Oates, Henny Youngman... to name just a few."

"Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is so called because it asserts that what makes up a city is not so much its physical structure but the impression it imparts upon its visitors, the way its inhabitants move within, something unseen that hums between the

O'Reilly's CD Bookshelf

"Organised alphabetically by district"

David Mitchell reveals how his books coagulate slowly in a primordial idea-soup

"It's not just about having enough shelves." Sir Tom Stoppard is in full flow, on a subject close to his heart: the London Library, of which he is president, and which he recently dubbed, simply, "the library I love".

Reading groups in Stoke Newington

"An open resouce on books: which are great, why, on what subjects, in whose opinion" and "a way to use online shopping to effect change."

First edition, published February 1998 by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, O'Reilly

"In this extract from the opening chapter, Kafka discusses his escape plans with the mysterious 'boy named Crow'"

"Kate Kellaway, freshly converted to the lonely pleasures of fiction from Tokyo, rounds up the latest"

Originally founded by author Raymond Queneau and mathematical historian Fran‽ois Le Lionnais, this group sought to create and incorporate restrictive techniques and methods into their writing.

From Susannah Breslin of invisible / reverse cowgirl fame